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the Oregon Encyclopedia

Last week I attended the celebration for the Oregon Encyclopedia’s 1,000th entry (on Joseph Meek). And with recently added material, the encyclopedia is up to 1,041 entries written by over 600 authors.

What’s the Oregon Encyclopedia, you ask? It’s an online compendium of all things Oregon—from agriculture, architecture, tand the arts to sports, transportation and technology. When I mention the Oregon Encyclopedia to people, they sometimes respond—“Oh, it’s an Oregon Wikipedia.” But it’s not. The articles are peer-reviewed, fact-checked in advance, and edited by a professional editorial team.

The OE, as it is known, is a partnership among Portland State University, the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, and the Oregon Historical Society, which also hosted the editorial board meeting and celebration last week. The idea of the Oregon Encyclopedia came about as part of the Oregon sesquicentennial and was announced on Feb. 14, 2008, the state’s 149th birthday.

Now there are over a thousand short entries—250-1000 words—on significant people, events, places, institutions in Oregon, from Bobby the Wonder Dog to the Roseburg Blast. And there are longer essays on some topics that run through Oregon’s history, along with hundreds of images, documents, and maps and special material for teachers and students. The response has been phenomenal. In the last six months, the OE website has been accessed by 118,439 users. Outreach efforts have included history night presentaions, special research initiatives, writing workshops, and today the OE has over fifty community partners around the state.

Portland State University historian Bill Lang is the Executive Editor of the Oregon Encyclopedia and, along with three senior editors, Ulrich Hardt, Linda Tamura, and Jeff LaLande, and a terrific staff—Marianne Keddington-Lang, Tania Hyatt-Evenson, and Amy Platt.

There is plenty of Ashland, literary and otherwise, in the OE too, with entries on Lawson Inada, Jerry Turner, Vladimir Nabokov in Ashland, Betty Laduke, Mary Perry Stone, Lenn Hannon, Dean Ing, and Les Aucoin, as well as the city of Ashland, Southern Oregon University, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, Jefferson Public Radio, Blackstone Audio, Cycle Oregon, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, the State of Jefferson, and the Schneider Museum of Art.

Ashland is well-represented among the authors too. Entries have been published by Kit Leary, Teresa Montomgery, Vince Wixon, Alan Armstong, Ed Battistella, Mary Gardiner, Joe Peterson, Aurora King, Paul Pavlich, Dennis Powers, Kevin Talbert, Mark Tveskov, Tom Nash, Don Reynolds, Phyllis Reynolds, Maryann Mason, Maureen Flanagan, Frank Lang, Stewart Janes, George Kramer, Ron Kramer, Mitzi Loftus, Jeff LaLande, Jamie Vener and McNair Scholars Kristi Russell, Tiffany McCormack, Jeff Proulx, and Danielle Mann.

For a writer, working with the OE is a great experience–you are forced to be concise, encouraged to be interesting, thoroughly fact-checked, and gently edited. What more can an writer ask?

The Oregon Encyclopedia is turning out be be one of the most innovative state encyclopedias around and if you are researching anything about the state it’s an invaluable resource. One of my students is doing a capstone project on Oregon literature and she’s using the OE extensively. Check out the Oregon Encyclopedia. There’s something for everyone.

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Apple is in a legal case filed against them over e-book pricing.  On April 12, 2012 Nick Wingfield of the New York Times explains why Apple is most likely not to be the loser in this battle with Amazon.  This legal case began by the Justice Department on Apple; the Department set up lawsuits against Apple and five other publishers who attempted to use e-books to reduce Amazon’s success in digital media and devices with the Kindle.

In regards to e-books, Apple versus Amazon’s main product battle is between the Kindle (and other e-books) versus Apple’s iPad.  Contrary to what the lawsuit may have proposed for Apple, iPad appeal and popularity did not decrease even as e-book sales continue to increase.  In fact the iPad is even more appealing/beneficial for Apple according to James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, who says, “his company indicated that games, Web browsing, Facebook and other applications are bigger parts of the appeal of the iPad than e-books.”  The Justice Department did not hurt Apple the way they had hoped.

Book publishers are worried that, with the lawsuit potentially favoring Apple, low pricing by Amazon may drive them out of business.  Local book publishing president for White Cloud Press Steve Scholl also gave a lecture to the History of Publishing class about the “Perils of Publishing.”  Steve explained the process which a printed book goes through, going from the publisher to distributors/wholesales, bookstores, and consumers loses much money – the publishing company, if it is small, does not profit much from a few books.  Similar to the Apple versus Amazon e-book sales, Steve also discussed how the rise and popularity of electronic books decreases sales of printed books.

Nicholas Economides, a professor of economics at New York University thinks the lawsuit is a “strong case.”  Book publishers are worrying that returns of low pricing by Amazon will drive them out of business, similar concerns of White Cloud Press president Steve Scholl.  Still, so many are in favor of Apple’s win – or if not win, not giving up easily.  Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University says “Apple has a history of being fairly aggressive in litigation.”

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For authors and editors, the call is a bit direr. As more and more books go digital and the sales of regular books are shrinking, authors may find themselves in an increasingly limited industry. Editors must report to editorial boards, which are more driven by bottom-line productivity, thus editors spend less time developing authors’ niche talent. And as book publishers scramble to make ends meet, authors will have an even smaller pool of capital to count on for up-front costs. This means the only people who will be authoring books are the same people who already have enough money to survive on an artist’s salary. The good news is that there is still a wide range of opportunities to write, and to publish, without necessarily becoming an author.

One example which recently came to my attention is ghostwriting. With ghostwriting, you don’t end up with any of the critical acclaim or public accreditation of your work; however, “Ghostwriting is one of the more likely ways to get to write for large and important audiences” (Nemko). http://money.usnews.com/money/ Blogs are another example of an excellent opportunity to write. And surprisingly, these different options appear to pay very well.

Apart from the production of books, there is another important and less understood aspect of this whole industry: the reader. Regular people who read an occasional book or magazine are the forgotten and unknown variable in all of this. The times continue to change because of – or in spite of – the regular people, sustaining the status quo, or railing against it. But in the land of change, what becomes of the status quo? Or, for that matter, regular people? Well, they must change too. And in fact, people are finding new ways to adapt, downloading free content online, accessing content on the go with mobile devices, and still picking up the occasional book or magazine from the discount wrack. As the regular person becomes more technology savvy, they must keep in mind that books are still just another form of technology. We may consider books as this great vestige of the old world knowledge gatherers, and simply expect them to be a permanent fixture in our culture. But the blatant truth is that technology changes, and with it people develop all new career expectations and cultural icons.

For now, books and book publishing are safe. But what are they really doing for the world? Is there such a thing as a sustainable book publisher? Is there a model for knowledge acquisition that doesn’t involve destroying life and the planet? Is it possible to know all about something without destroying that thing? Or is knowledge limited by the very limits of one’s destructiveness?

To learn how a book was made, I destroyed the book. I used a razor and cut it apart at the seams and peeled back the inside cover to see all the different parts. So it would appear that my knowledge about that book is directly proportional to my destruction of it. Our only way to know things is by taking them apart, but this could change. People could develop a new way to acquire knowledge by putting things together. Instead of thinking about publishers, marketers, authors, editors, and their audience as all separate entities with their own isolated conditions and fragmented problems, perhaps we could discover something new about all of these groups by putting them together as one. Ultimately, we are all regular people, trying to adapt and hack out a living. In that way, our motivations are all the same.

What does all this mean for the young upstart, trying to become a writer/editor? The author/editor relationship is apparently changing; and furthermore, there is no “how to” guide on writing the next great American novel, and much less on finding the perfect niche, or the perfect author/editor relationship. But, the best advice I’ve gotten so far is to just keep writing. And reading. There’s still work to be done.